Rereading what I wrote about The Circle, time does not seem to have flown in that universe. In the earlier novel we follow Mae Holland as she enters The Circle, a Google+Facebook media conglomerate. She quickly adopts to its philosophy and immerses herself in its workings. In The Every, The Circle has merged with Amazon into The Every, an even bigger, all-encompassing company that controls not just social media but also warehouses, stores, surveillance, transport and most other things people need to function. We do not know exactly how much time has elapsed between The Circle and The Every, but Mae Holland has become the leading figure at The Every, buying several smaller companies a week and incorporating them into The Every's business model.
In this new novel, we follow another young woman as she enters the company; Delaney Wells. Where Mae was naive and impressionable, Delaney enters The Every with the sole purpose of trying to destroy it from the inside out. We get a little bit of subplot as to why she thinks the Every is destroying people's lives (her parents lost their biological grocery store to an Every store and she was angry about the enforcement of cell phones in the national park where she worked as a park ranger). How she actually intends to do this is less clear; apparently she wants to launch as many intrusive apps as possible, so people will turn against The Every for intruding on their lives.
Other than that, we don't really get to know Delaney herself. Sometimes she too seems swept away with the need to control and record everything, at other times she struggles with the most basic privacy intrusions. She feels for one of her co-workers, Kiki, who is clearly suffering from all the goals she sets herself, but she doesn't do anything to interfere or help Kiki. Apart from these thoughts, we never see any personality traits, no more than we see the outlines of her plan.
With a flat character like this, the story hinges on the plot. Sadly, there isn't much of a plot to speak of either. The first half of the novel consists of all the crazy apps Delaney plants around the company, which are all quickly developed and launched without any resistance from users. In the second half her resolve seems to seep away as her plans all come to nothing, but some sort of plot kicks in as other people start to attack The Every in other ways. All in all, not much of a story.
But still, this novel is haunting. It gives an insight in how these corporations work, but also in how people work. And how this can lead to the horrors people willingly submit themselves to in The Every. The need for security, for knowing where others are and what they think of you, or knowing which goals you can achieve and how to go about reaching them, is universal and very recognisable. If then lawmakers and judges and others who can limit the exponential growth of a company that feeds upon this human insecurity are asleep, or somehow cancelled out (there are several examples of how The Every kills off any resistance in the novel), human nature will fall victim to such a dystopian scenario. That is wat makes this novel so scary; it could all very well become reality. I read somewhere that Dave Eggers was thinking up the crazy apps that Delaney proposes, but that he found out that many of the outrageous ideas he had already exist. Reality was scarier than fiction.
So as a novel, it is not the best. But as a warning, as a red flag against media monopolies and handing over basic human rights for fear of missing out on something, it is almost a must-read.
